Working on Kinetics, Mika’s Rocket and Butterfly

So, just recently, I got another in the can, I finished Kinetics. I’m really excited about this novella as, just like Butterfly, it has been sitting in the idea fountain for about 15 years. I still have the floppy disks and typewritten copies that they originally sat on. Butterfly is a novel but Kinetics is a novella at almost half the size.

Butterfly is a story about a young girl who discovered she’s growing wings…and how to manage being so different in this tech-saturated world. Kinetics is also about a young girl but she learns through her twin brother that she has various psychokinetic abilities. These are pretty small snaps of the stories I wrote but, eh, that’s what the longform books are for.

There is also the vignette, Mika’s Rocket which I really like. It’s a four part story series about a nerdy college-aged tinkerer, Tamika, and the life she lives making and modifying the technology around her – as she shares a house with her housemates. It’s pretty short (I still don’t even know what the total word count is) but I’m pleased with it. I’m glad I work and mess with tech as well so I wouldn’t be scratching my head so often when getting to the more technical stuff. But not too bogged down because I doubt many folks would want to see a story that’s more or less a shopping list for MicroCenter.

The only thing these writings have in common is that they all star Black girls/young women. It’s what I write, it’s what I do. I think Butterfly and Mika’s Rocket has LGBT+ primary characters but that list is definitely going to grow with future works (I tend to work on projects in chunks, thanks to a book I designed called The Masterbook, that will be a different post). I think that having diversity makes stories better because it’s a much wider net to draw from. Like, how many times are you going to put a random straight White guy in space? Or in a mythical world? Bro, too lame.

I’m very excited to have completed these three titles. Kinetics is getting sent off as query. Butterfly, the same. And I’m still sitting on what to do with Mika’s Rocket. I may slap it up on Wattpad since it is destined to be a short story vignette. (Ugh, and that reminds me, I have to fix the covers on Wattpad because they all have “Move” covers. Slow tech and sleepiness don’t mix). However, that could change in the future but right now, it’s chugging towards that. I would like to make a teeny anthology of my Wattpad works at the end of the year. Just print them out, bind them together, call it a day. And it looks like I’m not going to be updating Wattpad as frequently as I originally thought. It’s better for me and my brain so I don’t have too much on my plate.